The JCPOA and the Singapore Statement

Trump speaks at Washington rally against the Iran deal back in September 2015. Credit: Olivier Douliery/Sipa USA/Newscom

Abigail Tracy writes about the intra-administration positioning after the Singapore summit. Here she sums up the summit’s results:

Among foreign-policy experts I spoke with, the summit appeared to be a major win for North Korea based off the joint statement signed by the two leaders. “It is less than any statement that the North Koreans have ever agreed to in the past,” Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at Middlebury, told me last week. “The president continues to say that Kim is giving up his nuclear weapons. Kim continues to refuse to promise that. I don’t know how long they can keep fudging this.”

The president and other members of the administration have boxed themselves in with their insistence that anything less than “comprehensive, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID) is unacceptable. Trump’s delusion that North Korea agreed to anything close to this in Singapore compounds the problem, because it means that he is already taking victory laps for a process that has just barely started. Instead of continuing to “fudge” the huge gap between the two sides, the administration needs to modify its demands and expectations to match the reality that North Korea isn’t disarming.

Once there is no longer any illusion that North Korean disarmament might happen, U.S. and North Korean officials could have potentially very productive talks to reach important compromises on a permanent test freeze. One possibility that I have seen mentioned several times in the last few weeks is to propose that North Korea and the U.S. ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). That would be a significant improvement over the status quo in its own right, and it is something that is not nearly as far-fetched as CVID.

The trouble is that the president isn’t going to be interested in a modest, useful agreement when he already thinks North Korea has given up “everything.” His contempt for expertise and his habit of surrounding himself with flatterers and yes-men mean that no one is likely to tell him the truth about any of this, and if anyone did try to explain it to him he would dismiss it out of hand. The president’s rejection of the nuclear deal with Iran and his embrace of the “deal” in Singapore seem wildly contradictory in that the former was actually an agreement with verification measures and all the things the summit statement lacked. If Trump sees the JCPOA as fatally flawed, he ought to see the non-existent “deal” with North Korea as something even worse, but of course he isn’t judging either of these things on the merits. Once you realize that both positions stem from contempt for expertise and total ignorance of the relevant issues, it is not surprising that these are the positions that Trump has taken. It is also why so many of the people most supportive of the real nonproliferation agreement with Iran are so unimpressed with the phony one that Trump is celebrating.

It is also why so many of the people most supportive of the real nonproliferation agreement with Iran are so unimpressed with the phony one that Trump is celebrating.

Unfortunately, the converse is also true: Trump’s shiny-but-hollow “deal” with North Korea is being hailed as a fantabulous diplomatic coup of stunning import, vs. Obama’s “failures” with the JCPOA/Iran. Hailed mainly by Trump’s lackeys, toadies and lickspittle media with little/no regard for facts or serious analysis: but there we are…

Strange days. Dr. Larison’s remarks are as sharp and informed as ever, but consider this sentence:

The president and other members of the administration have boxed themselves in with their insistence that anything less than “comprehensive, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” (CVID) is unacceptable.

No doubt. But since when have Trump and the grifters around him ever felt constrained — even by what they said five minutes ago! They will simply deny every inconvenient reality, and their cult will be happy to do Olympic-scale doublethink backflips to justify it all. (Coming soon to a comment thread near you?)

Anyway, expecting consistency, intellectual integrity, any of those elementary virtues, has to go right out the door nowadays.

I’m hoping that, having collected some praise for Singapore, Trump will now get distracted by the next shiny vanity prize — and leave Korea to get sorted out by the Koreans. If he really does scale back U.S. maneuvers or even the entire American military presence on the peninsula, that’s great. I hope the Nobel committee can somehow make his Peace Prize conditional on him keeping his own hands off his great accomplishment. Describe it as a perfect jewel of statecraft, the best imaginable, incapable of improvement.

This Larison piece seems to downplay the significance of what North Korea is offering, seems to me, but it does point out Trump’s wildly uninformed contradictory behavior.

At this point Kim has agreed to step testing nuclear weapons and Trump has agreed to stop the exercises. This is a first step. Further steps could develop from here. This is not “nothing achieved” as this writer implies, and MSM seems to echo.

“At this point Kim has agreed to step testing nuclear weapons and Trump has agreed to stop the exercises. This is a first step. Further steps could develop from here. This is not “nothing achieved” as this writer implies, and MSM seems to echo.”

I think it’s an unreasonable exchange to start with. Trump gave them a huge concession while they just said what they always said. And a major goal for North Korea since the beginning was that we would pull out of the south militarily so they could go in and conquer it.

“And a major goal for North Korea since the beginning was that we would pull out of the south militarily so they could go in and conquer it.”

If indeed this is still North Korea’s goal, it’s wildly unrealistic. South Korea has grown up, and is quite capable of defending itself. South Korea has twice the population of the North, and an economy that is, on some estimates, 100 times the size of the North’s. Meanwhile, its military, though smaller than that of the North, is much more modern and better-equipped, and could be much better yet if the South Koreans started putting serious money into it (they don’t because why would they when the US is willing to pay for their defense for them). On top of all that, America withdrawing troops from South Korea would still leave a big American presence in Japan, so it’s not like the South would be completely on its own just because American troops aren’t stationed there.